Saturday, August 06, 2005

Jolly hockey sticks

It seems to be a popular theme in septic circles that the IPCC TAR is basically equivalent to the MBH98 "hockey stick". Of course the reason for this is obvious - according to this mindset, any flaw in the MBH98 work would directly "disprove" global warming.

Over in sci.environment, one of the resident septics regularly brings up the subject of the IPCC's overuse of the hockey stick, and presented these two images as evidence:

The new climate report, more than 1,000 pages in length, was the work of 123 lead authors and 516 contributing experts. It is the most comprehensive study ever made of the global warming phenomenon.

This doesn't exactly square with the septic viewpoint that the IPCC TAR was really based on a 4-page paper with 3 authors. But no matter. My real interest here is not the TAR itself but the extent to which the MBH98 picture has been used to promote climate alarmism.

I can now exclusively reveal the results of my painstaking investigation which took, ooh, at least several minutes. The very same graph was used by Bush in his famous "We must think about doing something, maybe, once I've got this pretzel problem sorted" speech:

It was also presented in Australia at the International Conference on Wallabies and Climate:

and it made an appearance on Red Nose Day too:

I'd be grateful for any further sightings of the hockey stick in the wild.

Heh! That's a good one. For those who may find this exchange meaningless at some random time in the future, the image search currently finds the 2nd pic of Houghton above, although on its original page rather than this copy. I guess the nearby appearance of the text "Coby Beck" fooled google...